Content+Marketing+KPIs_+A+Complete+Guide

Chapter 3: 12 Social Engagement KPIs That Matter 101 / 158 11. Followers Followers on social media are social accounts that subscribe in some fashion to your page/profile and its posts. They are generally the users most likely to receive your content organically. How to Track Followers Here is how to track followers on some of the most popular social networks: Facebook: On Facebook the primary followers of a page are traditionally known as “fans.” These are users who have at some point clicked a Like button for your page. Users can also “follow” a page, which is a way of subscribing to a page without registering as a fan. However, in Facebook Insights, fans and followers are lumped together as just “followers.” Navigate to the page and click the Insights tab, then “Followers” from the left navigation. There you will see a series of charts displaying your follower activity over time: Total page followers Net followers (displays number of followers gained and lost over time) Where your page followers happened (shows what users were doing when they became followers)

Chapter 3: 12 Social Engagement KPIs That Matter 102 / 158 Twitter: To see the growth of your Twitter following over time, click on the account avatar at upper right, and select “Analytics” from the dropdown menu. Now click on the Audiences tab. The default view on the Audiences tab is “your followers.” At the top you’ll see a graph of your follower count day-by-day over the past 30 days. For a more detailed and lengthier view of your following, try a third-party tool such as twittercounter.com. LinkedIn: Navigate to the page from your profile avatar. Click on Analytics and select “Followers” from the dropdown menu. Above the graph you’ll find the total follower count for your page, the number of organic followers gained over the past 30 days, and the number of acquired followers (gained through paid promotions). The graph shows a day-by-day number of followers gained over the specified time period. You can export the report to a spreadsheet for deeper analysis. Instagram: On the profile for your business account, tap the chart icon at upper right to go to analytics. Select Audience. This tab displays your total follower count to date, and how many followers you gained this 7-day period vs. the previous 7 days. Pinterest: Log into your Pinterest business profile. Hover over Analytics at top left and select “People you reach.” Change the “All audiences” button to “Your followers.” The graph shows how many of your followers viewed and engaged with your pins day-by-day over the selected time span. Pinterest does not display metrics for follower growth. Utilizing third-party analytics tools like Hootsuite or SEMrush Social Media Tracker is a convenient way of tracking your social fans' growth across different social media networks at once.

Chapter 3: 12 Social Engagement KPIs That Matter 103 / 158 How to Improve Followers The best way to grow your follower count is to be awesome! Create content that people want to share with others. Engage regularly with your current followers, seeking to turn them into evangelists for your brand and page. 12. Audience Demographics Audience demographics are a set of metrics describing various characteristics of your audience – things like location, age, gender, income, lifestyle, and more. These insights can help you to create better targeted content and social posts. How to Track Audience Demographics Here is how to track followers on some of the most popular social networks: Facebook: Navigate to your page and click the Insights tab, then “People” from the left navigation.

Chapter 3: 12 Social Engagement KPIs That Matter 104 / 158 At the top of the People tab are four tabs describing different segments of your audience: 1. Your fans (people who Liked your page) 2. Your followers (people who follow your page’s content) 3. People reached (people who saw any of your content, whether or not they are followers or fans) 4. People engaged (anyone who engaged in any way with your content) For each segment, the tab displays the following metrics: The percent of people in that segment in each age group, by male and female The top countries in which those people live The top cities in which those people live The top languages spoken by those people For much more in-depth demographics, create a Facebook Ad account (if you don’t already have one) and add a Facebook pixel to your site. The pixel will begin accumulating data from Facebook users who visit your site. The audience reports in the Facebook Ad Manager provide an astounding amount of information about your site visitors. You do not have to purchase any Facebook ads to use this feature.

Chapter 3: 12 Social Engagement KPIs That Matter 105 / 158 Twitter: Click on the account avatar at upper right and select “Analytics” from the dropdown menu. Now click on the Audiences tab. You can view data for three different audiences: Your followers (the default view) All Twitter users Your organic audience (people who have engaged with your tweets, whether or not they follow you) For each audience, you can see their most popular interests, the gender mix, household income, consumer buying styles, marital status, home ownership vs renters, and their most popular wireless carriers. The Your Followers segment offers even more demographic categories. LinkedIn: Navigate to the page from your profile avatar. Click on Analytics and select “Followers” from the dropdown menu. Below the graph you’ll see some rudimentary demographics for your page’s followers. Click on “Geography” to change to five other categories: Job Function, Seniority, Industry, Company Size and Employment Status. Instagram: On the profile for your business account, tap the chart icon at upper right to go to analytics. Select Audience. This tab displays a few basic demographics about your followers, including gender mix, age range, top locations, and time of day and days of week most active. Pinterest: Hover over Analytics at top left and select “People you reach.” Below the graph you can see the top countries, metro locations, languages and gender for your audience.

Chapter 3: 12 Social Engagement KPIs That Matter 106 / 158 How to Use Audience Demographics Audience demographics based on data can be the most effective way to build personas to inform your content and social media marketing strategies. They can also help you know if you’re actually reaching your target audience. If your demographics isn’t matching up with what you perceive of the most likely prospects for your business, then it’s time to work on new creative and content strategies that will appeal more to the audience you’re missing. The data may also awaken you to new opportunities.

Chapter 3.4: Top 10 User Engagement KPIs to Measure by Maddy Osman Founder & SEO Copywriter The Blogsmith

Chapter 3: Top 10 User Engagement KPIs to Measure 108 / 158 In today’s low-attention economy, site engagement can be considered an indicator of your website’s success. Content engagement metrics are important because they show how your content strategy aligns with user interest. Furthermore, customer engagement is related with overall profitability, as engaged users are more likely to buy, become repeat customers, and share the product/service with other people. Before you decide on the specific user engagement metrics you want to track, you have to determine which ones make the most sense for your business. Here are some of the most common (and most important) user engagement metrics. 1. Pageviews Pageviews, sessions, and users are the most common metrics used to indicate traffic on your website. Pageviews are the most basic of all user engagement metrics, measuring an instance of a user visiting a particular page on your website. Measuring pageviews can help you to understand how often people visit your website. A higher number can be assumed to be an indicator of interest and/or good SEO practices, since search engines are often the biggest drivers of traffic to websites. Conversely, pageviews can also indicate that people are poking around your website because they can't find anything. Pageviews show traffic but without tying in the context of other related metrics, they can’t help you to fully understand the meaning behind these numbers.

Chapter 3: Top 10 User Engagement KPIs to Measure 109 / 158 How to Track Pageviews You can use Google Analytics to track most user engagement metrics. It is perhaps the most comprehensive free analytics software tool available. You can find pageview metrics under Audience > Overview, and selecting a relevant time period. Aside from pageviews showing how many people visited your website over a given period of time, pageview analysis can also be used to show whether website changes (i.e. a new layout, an online ad campaign, etc) are performing as expected. As a simple rule of thumb, when your pageviews increase, it means that the changes you implemented must be working — at least in terms of driving traffic. How to Optimize/Improve Pageviews An increase in pageviews can be an indicator of good SEO practices. Some things you can do to increase pageviews: Provide a good user experience: Ensure your website loads fast. Users tend to abandon websites that do not load in 2-3 seconds. To improve site load speed, consider the implications of your design on usability, categorize content so it is easily found, and make sure that your website/content is mobile-optimized — since more than half of the world accesses the internet from their mobile phones.

Chapter 3: Top 10 User Engagement KPIs to Measure 110 / 158 Give your visitors interesting content to click on: Create viral content, but back it up by making it worth people’s time (not clickbait). Use SEO best practices, like keyword research and internal linking of related content, to make sure that content is found and read. Break long posts into series and feature popular posts prominently. Promote your website: Get the word out on social media, guest blogging, and related forums. 2. Time on Page With so many websites churning out content on a regular basis, gaining an understanding of how much time people actually spend on your content has become an important user engagement metric. There are two ways to look at time spent: Micro view: time spent on page Macro view: the average session duration or average time spent on site It’s fairly straightforward: the time spent on page user engagement metric measures the time a user spends on a page on your website. This metric provides an indication of interest.

Chapter 3: Top 10 User Engagement KPIs to Measure 111 / 158 For example, the average person reads at a rate of about 200-250 words per minute. If you have articles that are 2,100 words long (the optimal blog post length, as found by Medium) and a visitor only spent 10 seconds on that page, you can be sure that they weren’t very interested in the content. Average Session Duration (formerly known as Average Time Spent on Site) measures the length of an average session (Session Duration), over a specific time period, divided by the total number of sessions over a specific time period. Session refers to a group of user interactions with your website. The average session duration refers to the total time spent on your website. This is different from time spent on page because it tracks all the activity a visitor has completed on your website versus tracking just the time spent on a certain page. How to Track Time Spent You can use Google Analytics to track how much time people spend on your website. You can find both average session duration metrics under the ‘Acquisition’ tab. Google Analytics tracks page activities using timestamps every time a page loads or when an activity triggers more events. This is measured by looking at the difference between when the first event occurred compared to the next. For example: if a page was viewed at 9:23 am and the next one was viewed at 9:26 am, the time spent on page for the first page is 3 minutes.

Chapter 3: Top 10 User Engagement KPIs to Measure 112 / 158 The problem with using timestamps to track activity is that it cannot track the time spent on the exit page. The exit page is the last page the visitor sees before they exit the website completely. This means that if a visitor spends 5 minutes on your website but does not visit another page, Google Analytics has no way of knowing or recording this. So if someone only visited one page and exited it, Google Analytics records the session duration as 0 — regardless of how much time they actually spent on your website. Thus, the values of average session duration and time spent on page reported are usually lower than what they actually are and should not be taken at face value. Instead, look at the distribution of session duration data to have a better idea of the typical session — and remove outliers. What Counts Toward Time Spent? Many people wonder about what exactly counts toward the time spent on site user engagement metric. Website parking occurs when you open a tab and leave it open to read later on. The answer is that it depends on how the Google Analytics code is triggered and how fast it is sent to Google Analytics. Additionally, Google answers, “By default, a session lasts until there's 30 minutes of inactivity, but you can adjust this limit so a session lasts from a few seconds to several hours”. A similar question you may have: does watching video count toward time on site? The answer? Yes! Google Analytics tracks interaction events, or events where a user interacted with the website.

Chapter 3: Top 10 User Engagement KPIs to Measure 113 / 158 How to Optimize/Improve Time Spent on Page Because every website is different (in terms of industry, size, optimization), you should focus on comparing your current website statistics to your own past data. Choose a specific time frame (a year is recommended) and use Google Analytics advanced filtering options to determine which pages receive the most traffic, consistently. Make your way to Behavior > Content Drilldown. On the Primary Dimension field, choose Page. Then, make your way to the Advanced filtering option. Choose to filter by Unique Pageviews, then choose a number to match up against. You’ll see the average time spent on page change. If you know that your average blog post is about 500 words, and your readers spend between 1-2 minutes reading them, then you're in a good range. But if they spend less time on the page, then analyze what could be making them exit prematurely: is it your writing style? Does your page take a long time to load?

Chapter 3: Top 10 User Engagement KPIs to Measure 114 / 158 How to Optimize/Improve Average Session Duration Session durations are a little harder to optimize. Because it measures more of a macro view, there are different considerations than that of time spent on page. For one, you need to consider the overall user experience on your site. This includes: The variety and value of content on your site Ease of navigation on your site and user site experience Clear calls-to-action (CTAs) If you're able to optimize these three things, you may see average session duration rise. 3. Bounce Rate Closely related to time spent is the bounce rate. A common trend observed is that the bounce rate is inversely proportional to the average session duration: as the bounce rate increases, the average session duration decreases. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a website that exit after only viewing one page. The bounce rate gives an indication of how good your content is, because if people are leaving without taking action, then your content isn't doing its job.

Chapter 3: Top 10 User Engagement KPIs to Measure 115 / 158 People may bounce for several reasons: Your CTA/offer isn't clear. Your content/offer isn't what they expected. They got bored. You're not offering something different. While it is important to measure how engaged your visitors are, it’s also important to measure how unengaged your visitors are. You might have high traffic numbers but if you also have high bounce rates, this means your content isn't engaging enough to make website visitors stick around. How to Track Bounce Rate In Google Analytics, go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages. You will see a column for Bounce Rate. How to Improve Bounce Rate Look at your pages with high engagement and low bounce rates. Try to determine what you did right on the page that could be applied to other pages. Similar to Average Session Duration, some specific ways you can lower bounce rates: Produce great content and use internal linking to get people interested in clicking through to other related pages on your website. Deliver on your content. Be reliable, helpful, and memorable.

Chapter 3: Top 10 User Engagement KPIs to Measure 116 / 158 Use clear CTAs. Provide a great user experience: no pop-up ads, audio, or automatic video playback. 4. Top Exit Pages Exit pages are the last pages accessed before leaving a website. The exit rate measures the percentage of people that leave your website from the exit page. The exit pages (and subsequently, the exit rates) are related to bounce rates in that they both consider the last pages a visitor goes to on a website. The main difference between these user engagement metrics? The bounce rate takes into consideration the number of visitors that exit your website after visiting a single page. Calculating the exit rate can be helpful, especially when your website encourages customers to follow a certain path (the buyer’s journey). Knowing your top exit pages can help you make sense of why your exit rate is the way it is. Some pages are designed to have high exit rates, like your contact page, or a “Thank You” page. When a page is designated as an exit page, a high exit rate indicates that customers completed the desired action.

Chapter 3: Top 10 User Engagement KPIs to Measure 117 / 158 A high exit rate on a non-exit page can be caused by: Poorly organized information on your website (hierarchical issues). Missing CTA (so the person just exits the website). Overwhelming amount of information. Lacking/Missing information. How to Track Exit Pages Exit pages can be determined by going to Behavior > Site Content > Exit Pages on Google Analytics. There, you’ll see the number of exits, the number of pageviews, and the exit rate (% Exit). To calculate the exit rate, divide the number of times a visitor exits a particular page by the total number of page views. It’s worth noting that a high exit rate is correlated to time on page values that vary a lot, and can in fact, contribute to bloated data. How to Optimize/Improve Top Exit Pages Carefully plan your user flow/journey so that you can plan for which pages should have high exit rates. Since top exit pages and exit rates are related to bounce rates, to optimize them, you have to: Improve your content Improve site usability/information organization Have clear CTAs

Chapter 3: Top 10 User Engagement KPIs to Measure 118 / 158 5. Pages per Session Another way of measuring interest in your content is pages per session, or the number of unique page visits per session. From a business perspective, the higher the pages per session metric, the better. This is because a high pages per session count shows that your website visitors looked around and visited more than one page – truly engaging with your website. Bounce rates are similar to pages per session, but while bounce rates look at the next step (or page), pages per session looks at the whole path the visitor follows. How to Track Exit Pages Go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels on Google Analytics. You’ll see a column for Pages/Session. To calculate the number of pages per session, take the sum of the number of pages each user visited and divide it by the total number of sessions. A high value of pages per session does not necessarily mean that people are interested in your content – that’s why it is important to look at pages per session in conjunction with average session duration and bounce rate. A page with high pages per session – but low session duration and bounce rate – can indicate page flipping behavior due to disinterest, irrelevant content, or difficulty in navigating your website.

Chapter 3: Top 10 User Engagement KPIs to Measure 119 / 158 How to Optimize/Improve Pages per Session Provide ‘next steps’, or content that aligns with visitor interest. Align your content hierarchy/flow with the buyer’s journey. 6. Page/Scroll Depth Page (or scroll) depth measures how thoroughly your audience consumes your content by tracking where on the page they stop reading. This can indicate two things: Readability: If your content is easy to read, people will go further down the page. Interest: It is assumed that the further people scroll down your page, the more they want to consume your content. How to Track Page/Scroll Depth Google Analytics does not have a built-in option to measure scroll depth, which is why you have to install the Scroll Depth Google Analytics plugin to enable tracking. The plugin tracks the percentage of your page where visitors stop: 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100% depth, as well as which elements they scroll to, and pixel depth.

Chapter 3: Top 10 User Engagement KPIs to Measure 120 / 158 Pixel depth provides an absolute measure of where the audience stops, comparing this across devices where screen heights vary. The plugin sends the data to Google Analytics via Events. Another option is to use Google Tag Manager. Just like the Scroll Depth plugin, it allows you to track pixel and percentage depth. How to Improve Page/Scroll Depth Consider the elements that correlate to the various scroll depths where people drop off: What’s happening? Is there something about the page that’s negatively impacting user experience? Is content starting to fall flat as visitors make their way deeper into an article? Armed with the data and understanding you now have behind the most popular user engagement metrics, you’ll have multiple options to approach fixing this problem.

Chapter 3: Top 10 User Engagement KPIs to Measure 121 / 158 7. Unique Visitors Unique visitor is a term used to refer to a person that visits a website at least once during the reporting period. Google puts more emphasis on tracking page views (or visits) but the unique visitors metric shows how many individuals your website actually reaches. How to Track Unique Visitors Whenever you visit a website, Google Analytics assigns you a client ID that is stored in a cookie in your browser. This client ID is unique to every browser and not IP address, so if you visit a website using another browser, Google Analytics will recognize you as another unique user. This can pose a problem or report inaccurate results because of situations such as: Multiple people in a household sharing one computer. There may be multiple visitors but only one is registered. A single user can visit your website from different computers or different browsers. This will be counted as multiple visits, when they actually came from one person. Someone manually clears their cookies and will be counted as two users in reporting. In Google Analytics, go to Audience > Overview and look at the Users metric. This will tell you the number of unique visitors to your site.

Chapter 3: Top 10 User Engagement KPIs to Measure 122 / 158 Tracking and comparing your stats for unique visitors over a specific time period can tell you whether any new visitors are discovering your website (useful when you launch new campaigns or ads), or if your traffic comes from returning users. How to Optimize/Improve Unique Visitors Know your audience. If you have a good grasp of who your existing audience is, you can use these metrics to take steps to find a new/related audience segment. Promote your website, taking care to look toward the impact on different audience segments. 8. New vs. Returning Visitors New users are users who are accessing your website for the first time on a specific device. As mentioned, Google uses client IDs to track users. If you're using a mobile phone to access a website — then using your desktop to visit the same website again (but the first time on the desktop) — Google counts this activity as two new visitors. To their credit, Google is becoming smarter about this. When you're signed in on Google Chrome using two different devices, it will only record the first device as a new visitor and the second device as a returning visitor.

Chapter 3: Top 10 User Engagement KPIs to Measure 123 / 158 Returning visitors are those that have previously visited your website. Google defines new users within a two-year time frame. If you revisit a website within the two-year time frame, you are considered a returning visitor, and if you visit a website again after more than two years, you will be counted as a new visitor again. This metric is presented as a pie graph, comparing the ratio between the two. How to Track New Visitors vs Returning Visitors Find this data under Audience > Behavior > New vs Returning. You’ll see a table comparing the behavior of new and returning visitors with some of the metrics previously discussed, such as bounce rate, pages/session, and average session duration. You can check new users under Acquisition > Overview. Under the Acquisition tab, you’ll also be able to see the Source/Medium of the traffic, as well as Referral Source. If your returning visitors metric is higher than new users, this might be a sign that you have a loyal band of followers. The opposite situation demonstrates that you have some work to do to get people to come back again. How to Optimize/Improve New vs. Returning Visitors Your New vs Returning Visitors graph can reflect the results of campaigns you used to promote your website.

Chapter 3: Top 10 User Engagement KPIs to Measure 124 / 158 A few examples: Display advertising aims to target new (relevant) users, so if the campaign was successful, expect an increase in new users (slightly larger than from social, depending on the advertising budget). Organic search tends to result in even distribution. Email marketing from your CRM should lead to more returning visitors. If it’s a new list of prospects, expect more new visitors. Direct traffic is counted when people type your website’s URL in their browser or retrieve it from their bookmarked sites — this will show mostly returning users. You can segment your channels according to these traffic sources. It’s important to stack these dimensions against other metrics, like goal completion. If your returning visitors convert more than new visitors, think of strategies to appeal to this group. Or, if there’s a higher bounce rate with returning visitors, there may be something wrong with your content or user experience.

Chapter 3: Top 10 User Engagement KPIs to Measure 125 / 158 9. Conversion Rate Customer engagement is linked to overall profitability and can lead to conversions. The conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors that complete desired actions, such as: Purchasing any of your products or services. Downloading your app, ebook, etc. Contacting your business/submitting a form. Engaging with your website in some way. A high conversion rate tells you that your marketing tactics are effective because they resulted in your website visitors completing your end goal. How to Track Conversion Rate The great thing about conversion rates is that you can tailor them to be broad or specific in terms of things like: Overall conversion rate Marketing channel conversion rate Keyword conversion rate Most social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest have their own built-in analytics tools that can be used to track conversion rates. For websites, you can use tools such as Google Analytics or Google AdWords to track certain conversion rates.

Chapter 3: Top 10 User Engagement KPIs to Measure 126 / 158 There is a dedicated tab on Google Analytics for conversions, which allows you to analyze data based on goals, attribution, or multi-channel funnels. There’s also an option specific to e-commerce. How to Optimize Conversion Rate Because conversions are the end goal, marketing is often tasked with conversion rate optimization (CRO), which aims to maximize the number of conversions. The basic principle of CRO? To make everything seamless and easy for the website visitors to convert. What makes CRO unique is that aims to increase revenue with the traffic you're currently getting—so you can do CRO even if you don't have that much traffic to begin with. CRO starts with measuring analytics to know your baseline, analyzing this data and implementing changes (usually called split or A/B testing). OptinMonster has several A/B testing tools and Google Optimize offers a free alternative. There are several ways to increase conversion rates (here are 53 ways you can do so), depending on what you’re trying to optimize — as well as some uncommon CRO tactics to consider.

Chapter 3: Top 10 User Engagement KPIs to Measure 127 / 158 10. Abandonment Rate Cart Abandonment Rate (also referred to as abandonment rate) is the percentage of carts abandoned to the number of initiated (or completed) transactions. This is especially pertinent for e-commerce businesses. Based on the Baymard Institute’s research compilation, about 69.23 percent of online shopping carts are abandoned, meaning that for every 10 transactions, only 3 were successful. If you're an e-commerce business owner, the goal is to keep abandonment rates low, and for customers to convert or purchase from their abandoned carts. How to Track Abandonment Rate Google Analytics now has a Conversions tab specifically for e-commerce. Once you’ve set it up, go to Conversions > Ecommerce > Shopping Behavior. There, you’ll see information about the different stages of the customer journey for the time period you selected. This includes customers that: Didn't add anything to the cart Added something to the cart Abandoned it Those who abandoned at checkout

Chapter 3: Top 10 User Engagement KPIs to Measure 128 / 158 Tracking cart abandonment at different stages allows to you monitor any unusual changes. For example, if one stage’s abandonment rate is higher than usual, then this may be a sign of usability issues. When you click on the red arrow under each of these dimensions, Google will prompt you to create a segment. This can be applied to other reports and factors, such as device used, browser used, demographics, and traffic sources. This is useful so that you can infer what influenced the cart to be abandoned. For example, if visitors are abandoning their carts at checkout, it could be that your checkout process is too long, payment options are too limited, or your shipping fee is too expensive. How to Optimize/Improve Abandonment Rate To improve abandonment rates, AcquireConvert suggests a BEFORE and AFTER strategy, specifically: Improve the buying process BEFORE people check out AND Implement a follow-up strategy AFTER they abandon their carts

Chapter 3: Top 10 User Engagement KPIs to Measure 129 / 158 BEFORE Always ensure that your website is secure and functioning well, with clear CTAs. Additionally, have a quick checkout process. E-commerce giant Amazon earns so much because of their quick checkout process that includes one- click ordering, dash buttons, and more. Also, consider offering guest check- out so that people don’t have to create an account to make a purchase. Finally, avoid surprises—like shipping costs. Shipping cost is the number 1 reason for abandoned carts. Also, to help avoid surprises, show the customers progress indicators until checkout is complete. AFTER Most importantly, send abandoned cart emails. Depending on your email marketing software, this is fairly easy to set up. Send at least three emails: the first one within an hour. If they are a first-time customer, you might want to send them a discount code to encourage them to shop. Create urgency with a time-sensitive offer. Final Thoughts: User Engagement Metrics User engagement metrics are important to track because increased engagement is linked to increased profitability. The good news is that a free Google Analytics account can track most of these metrics, and all of these metrics are interrelated. This means that optimizing for one metric can help improve another. For best results, focus on creating content that your target audience wants to read, with clear CTAs. From there, focus on optimizing your website and user site experience.

Chapter 4: Your Guide to Picking the Right KPIs for Content by Benj Arriola SEO Director Myers Media Group

Chapter 4: Your Guide to Picking the Right KPIs for Content 131 / 158 Every digital marketing campaign has key performance indicators (KPIs). Most of the time, profitability is a main factor in the KPIs. In every digital marketing campaign, you have multiple channels and every channel requires different strategies and tactics. Many of these channels deal with content. In the SEO world, you may have heard the phrase “content is king.” While content is not the only tool you should utilize, it still plays an essential role in your overall digital marketing strategy. However, measuring your content’s success is not always simple. This guide will serve as a reference on how to select the right KPIs for an accurate measure of success. As different businesses use content in different ways, the KPIs may vary accordingly. The same is true for the different role players within the digital marketing process, who may want to monitor different KPIs. Who Wants to Know Your Content’s KPIs It’s important to determine who needs to know more about your KPIs before actually narrowing down which KPIs you will use. Knowing who needs to use these KPIs will give you valuable insight as to which types will be most beneficial to your campaign.

Chapter 4: Your Guide to Picking the Right KPIs for Content 132 / 158 We will be looking at four different types of organizations: A Business-to-Consumer (B2C) company. A Business-to-Business (B2B) company. A marketing agency. A content publisher. For every metric that these companies may analyze, there is a set of supporting metrics. For example, in a large B2B company, the main executives may want to track metrics that show the profits of their content marketing campaign. However, the marketing manager will want to drill down and see what kind of online website traffic they are getting and where it comes from. KPIs may reach a deeper level for some organizations depending on the level of knowledge they have to comprehend the metrics. Some are only interested in the main metrics and disregard the supporting metrics. Others will pay close attention to all levels of metrics. Any company can track all metrics, but their main goals can help organize certain KPIs by their level of importance. This chapter will examine four different organizational categories and the main KPIs needed to track their success. We will also cover supporting KPIs that provide additional insights. By now, you should be more familiar with these individual KPIs. This article will not cover definitions or methods for measuring KPIs; and will focus more on the level of importance of certain KPIs for different types of businesses.

Chapter 4: Your Guide to Picking the Right KPIs for Content 133 / 158 B2C Content KPIs For B2C companies, the main goal is often to sell more products or services to customers. Thus, the most important metrics measure sales and revenue; these KPIs measure how much money they are making. The metrics that are directly proportional to the profits of the business are the main KPIs. These are labeled with the 5-star KPIs below. Secondary KPIs may not be directly indicative of the profits of the company, but when you see major improvement in these KPIs, they are usually one step behind a sale. An improvement in these secondary KPIs usually implies improvement in the main KPIs.

Chapter 4: Your Guide to Picking the Right KPIs for Content 134 / 158 Depending on the size of the company, these can differ. A large organization will have multiple stakeholders and the main executives are likely only interested in the main KPIs. For smaller organizations, where employees hold multiple roles, many people in the company may be interested in the secondary KPIs because they can see the effectiveness of their own marketing efforts. B2B Content KPIs Since B2B companies operate more like partnerships, the business cycle takes much longer and a single sale may take months to close. There are more meetings between the companies, product demonstrations, signing of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), and negotiating on terms. For companies like this, aside from being concerned with metrics related to sales and revenue, the goals are typically measured through lead generation. Leads can still be called conversions although they are not necessarily selling a product or service in the conversion, they still gather valuable contact information of a target client.

Chapter 4: Your Guide to Picking the Right KPIs for Content 135 / 158 Not all B2B companies are large, however, this is often the case. Larger companies usually have a marketing budget that is spent in part on online advertising, social sponsored post, or on any digital marketing channel. B2B companies are often interested in measuring how effective these campaigns are. Marketing Agency Content KPIs Marketing agencies use content in different ways including anything from social media or blog posts to white papers. These combined efforts all contribute to a sale, but what they want to see is how effective the individual campaigns are.

Chapter 4: Your Guide to Picking the Right KPIs for Content 136 / 158 Sometimes, these strategies work in the early stages of the marketing funnel when a client’s product or service is introduced to a new audience in an effort to increase brand awareness. Many of the KPIs mentioned for B2B and B2C companies are the same as the top KPIs for agencies, but many of the secondary KPIs differ. Also note that the content a digital marketing agency creates may not always intend to lead to a conversion. Sometimes the content created by agencies is geared towards increasing brand awareness.

Chapter 4: Your Guide to Picking the Right KPIs for Content 137 / 158 In SEO, the goal of content marketing is to create content that people want to share and link to in order to get more inbound links. This content can also be shared on social media or tied to press release distributions and email campaigns. Even if these content pieces start to become viral and are trending on social media, they don’t always lead to conversions. However, they build valuable brand awareness that can lead to higher SERP rankings. From a KPI standpoint, companies should also measure the popularity of their content marketing campaigns in addition to metrics related to sales and revenue.

Chapter 4: Your Guide to Picking the Right KPIs for Content 138 / 158 Publisher Content KPIs News companies, online entertainment magazines, and blog owners mainly earn profits from advertising income. To sell more advertising, their site has to be more attractive to advertisers. Some publishers also have paid subscriptions and will track income from online conversions.

Chapter 4: Your Guide to Picking the Right KPIs for Content 139 / 158 The most important KPIs for publishers are the ones that prove that their site has a lot of visitors. Sometimes publishers refer to this as “eyeballs” when talking to prospective advertisers on their site. Traffic is the main metric that will show how many visitors you have on your site. Social shares are also important because they can increase this visibility. You Do Not Need to Stop at the Common KPIs The main KPIs enumerated for each type of business are probably the most common KPIs used by these entities because they are easily tied to their goals and objectives. These KPIs indicate success at a glance. However, anyone can always take a deeper dive and look further into other KPIs. It all depends on your own knowledge of how your content works for you, and if you are in a position to create change to make things better based on the insights gained from the other KPIs. For a complete list of all KPIs discussed here and also in the previous chapters of this book, you can refer to the table below The table includes a 5-star rating where 5 is the highest priority KPI; however, if you wear multiple hats in your company and work with the digital marketers, you can also pay attention to the lower stars in this table.

Chapter 4: Your Guide to Picking the Right KPIs for Content 140 / 158

Chapter 4: Your Guide to Picking the Right KPIs for Content 141 / 158 Additionally, every company markets their services in a unique way. This table is not a definitive guide to the importance of all KPIs; KPIs with one or two stars on this list could be incredibly important for your company, but not to others. The only wrong way to use a KPI is when you select your measures based on what is trending in a positive direction, not what actually measures your company’s success. Although uptrending presentable colored graphs of specific KPIs may impress stakeholders, they would not be good KPIs if they are not indicative of a company’s true success in line with its goal and objectives.

Chapter 5: How to Build a Content Marketing Workflow with SEMrush to Achieve Your KPIs by Ashley Ward Digital Marketing Strategist SEMrush

Chapter 5: How to Build a Content Marketing Workflow with SEMrush 143 / 158 Now that you’ve selected all of the relevant KPIs for your content, the next task is to create a content marketing workflow, one that will build efficiencies into the process. This means taking more of data-driven approach that actually charts and streamlines the content marketing process and is the core of the SEMrush Content Toolkit. The following are the four steps to help you streamline your content and also how you can leverage the SEMrush Content Toolkit to create a more efficient content marketing strategy. Step 1: Content Ideation The first step in creating a content marketing workflow that will help you meet your KPIs is brainstorming. Content ideation is arguably the most difficult of the four steps, as it presents an ongoing challenge for content marketers to not only develop a compelling subject, but one that will position and perform well. This is where the Topic Research tool can assist you. Putting this powerful tool to work, you can access an analysis of your competitors’ top- performing content and discover new topic ideas that your users actually want to see. After reviewing the competitive topic data and zoning in on a topic that you’d like to cover with your related seed keyword, you’ll receive a dashboard showing a variety of information about the topic.

Chapter 5: How to Build a Content Marketing Workflow with SEMrush 144 / 158 This extra data makes up the: Trending subtopics and headlines centered around your seed keyword A list of questions associated with the topic that people search for online Competitive intel on the most popular sources addressing them The results are then color-coded to show how well the headlines perform in terms of backlinks. Below is an example of this using the topic targeting the keyword “dog clothes”:

Chapter 5: How to Build a Content Marketing Workflow with SEMrush 145 / 158 You have the option to organize results by volume of the top sources first or by keyword difficulty to view those keywords with the highest difficulty first. You also have the option of adding other parameters to further pare down the results and narrow in on the best topic for your audience, keyword, and domain. At this point in the ideation stage, keyword research enters the process. You can then use the Keyword Magic tool to discover additional keywords to incorporate into your content. The Keyword Magic tool automatically sorts all the keyword suggestions by related search topics and their respective search volumes. This will help give you a more realistic chance of being visible in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Chapter 5: How to Build a Content Marketing Workflow with SEMrush 146 / 158 Using the tool, you can filter the keywords that best suit the needs of your content, such as those that are in the form of a question or that trigger SERP features like featured snippets. This will help you further refine your content idea by selecting high- volume, low-competition keywords that will increase the chances of your article surfacing in the top search results. These are known as “long tail” keywords and they elaborate on the overarching seed keyword (the “head” of the tail) that is likely to encounter stiff competition from Wikipedia and other authoritative sources. Focusing on long tail keywords (also known as key phrases) is an especially smart strategy for smaller businesses struggling to compete with the big players in their industry. Coupled with the Keyword Magic tool, the Topic Research tool will help you come up with a competitive content topic and headline that will catch the attention of both your target audience and the search engines. To keep the content marketing workflow running smoothly, you’ll want to repeat the research to keep current with the latest trends around your topic. This way you’ll be able to keep your content relevant and fresh, and your headline competitive. Now you’re ready to move on to Step 2 of the content marketing workflow: Creating the Content.

Chapter 5: How to Build a Content Marketing Workflow with SEMrush 147 / 158 Step 2: Content Creation By zoning in on a winning headline using the Topic Research and Keyword Magic tools, you’ve already accomplished 80% of the work for creating an attention-grabbing post. An important step to take given that 8 out of 10 people only read the headlines. With that accomplished, Step 2 of building your content marketing workflow becomes much easier. Your informed and undoubtedly well- written headline already defines what the topic is and what question, problem, or pain point your content will address. But what about ensuring that you hold the attention of your target audience AND the search engines? Your headline can only carry the content so far, and this conundrum is particularly problematic for evergreen type of posts. To achieve the competitive edge, the body of your content also needs to be optimized for search engines so it continues to rank well beyond the content flavor of the week, and thereby continues to attract unique visitors to your site. This is the primary task of Step 2, and where the SEO Content Template (SCT) and SEO Writing Assistant tools can help you create a body of content that is optimized for both readers and search engines. Like the Topic Research and Keyword Magic tools, the SEO Content Template and SEO Writing Assistant tools are designed for ease and expediency. You’ve already identified the keywords to incorporate into your content, so now by simply entering your selected keywords into the SEO Content Template tool, you’ll receive a set of recommendations.

Chapter 5: How to Build a Content Marketing Workflow with SEMrush 148 / 158 These tips will tell you how to build your content for the keywords you’re targeting based on an analysis of content from your top 10 competitors on Google. Then, the SEO writing assistant will analyze how your text complies with those recommendations. The SEO Content Template goes beyond keyword-specific recommendations, as search optimization is a much broader subject. Beyond structuring the article so that the volume of keywords in your title, headings and paragraphs descends accordingly, content optimization means considering variables that speak to content quality and off-page SEO factors. These include the inclusion of semantically related words and backlinks, as well as text length and readability. Using the example of the seed keyword “dog clothes,” the key recommendations section of the SEO Content Template would return something like this: So by understanding the features that make up the top performing content of your online rivals, you now have the competitive advantage of outdoing them with your own optimized content that both readers and search engines will love. After your copy is complete, run it through the SEO writing assistant tool to be sure you’ve met all the suggested optimization requirements.

Chapter 5: How to Build a Content Marketing Workflow with SEMrush 149 / 158 Step 3: Distribution of Content You’ve now created a fantastic and well-optimized content piece. The next step in your content marketing workflow is distributing this great piece of content. This step is critical to achieving your content KPIs. What goes into the distribution you ask? In order to distribute the content, you need to promote it on social networks, acquiring backlinks, and posting it on external resources. However well-optimized and link-worthy your content is, it takes time to gain traction relying strictly on SEO. It can take up to a year before you start to see higher organic rankings for your content. The solution to not having to wait so long is a smart distribution strategy that increases the chances of visibility for your content. For this step in your content marketing workflow, there are three invaluable tools in the SEMrush content arsenal: Brand Monitoring, Social Media Tracker and Social Media Poster. For the most visible brand mentions and quality links to your content, reach out directly to the most authoritative sources in your industry or niche to let them know about your newly created content. If they like your content well enough, they might even share it on their own site, especially if your industry niches and brand service complement each other. If you don’t immediately know who the thought leaders are in your industry, you can use the Social Media Tracker tool to identify the most authoritative influencers in your industry with the ‘Mentioners’ report.

Chapter 5: How to Build a Content Marketing Workflow with SEMrush 150 / 158 If influencers are too small in number or too big to approach, you can use the Brand Monitoring tool to find external resources that your competitors use to publish their content, and then sort them by authority for guest blogging outreach. If you happen to find domains that mention your brand but hold no interest to you, you can block them from further research.